Maintenance and repair are necessary during the life of a mobile vehicle in order to keep the vehicle functioning properly. Each operational system of a mobile vehicle is generally controlled by a specific electronic control, referred to as a “module.” Some examples of operational systems include body control system, radio control system, remote function activation (RFA) system and the heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) system. Maintenance and repair of a given operational system therefore, may also involve working with the electronic control module for that system. In some instances, a module may be determined to be bad. Repair is accomplished by replacing the bad module.
Currently, if the bad module keeps settings that have been personalized, these setting are lost once the bad module is replaced with a new module. In some cases personalization settings are irretrievable when communication cannot be established with a module. It is desirable for customer satisfaction to keep many of these settings as they were before the vehicle repair. For example, some typical personalized settings in the body control module (BCM) include a setting for the length of time that the light on is delayed (i.e., delay light for 30, 60 or 90 seconds) and settings for when doors should be locked or unlocked (i.e. unlock doors when vehicle is in park or lock doors when vehicle is at a certain speed or lock doors according to child proof lock settings). Other settings include preferred radio stations, current local time, equalization, fade, treble level and bass level in the radio control module. Other personalized settings include preferred settings for the RFA such as door lock personalization settings (e.g. unlock one door or all doors) and automatic positioning settings for the driver's seat. Clock settings and compass calibrations for the customer's region are other examples of personalized settings that may be lost with replacement of a bad module.
The repair service and/or dealer must then manually reset whatever settings can be reset. In some cases, the customer loses all personalized settings. Furthermore, in some cases, the personalized settings are irretrievable when communication cannot be established with a particular module.
Certain settings, such as vehicle safety settings, theft protection settings and driving operation control settings, are stored in secured memory. These settings persist whatever module is replaced. However, secured memory is limited and expensive and is used for the vital settings detailed above. Little or no secured memory is left to store personalized vehicle settings.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system and method for managing and persisting personalized settings in a mobile vehicle using a mobile vehicle communication system. It would be desirable to implement this system and method at the time of vehicle maintenance
It is an object of this invention, therefore, to provide a method for persisting personalized vehicle settings at the time of vehicle maintenance, and to overcome the obstacles described above.